Lammie

Lammie, alive and well in 2013

I don’t remember exactly how Lammie appeared anymore, but he probably came in one of the boxes Grandma Donovan would send every few months. Usually, these packages were stuffed with gorgeous clothes two sizes too small for me. But Lammie wasn’t too small at all. He was huge — almost too big for an eight-year-old girl to put her arms around. He must have come in the spring, along with the swiss-dotted Easter dress that I couldn’t zip up and the Easter card with the flowery script and the lilies embossed with gold. He was a rather minimalistic interpretation of a sheep: a rectangular puff of cream-colored fleece with four black stubs for legs and a black snout poking out between two fleecy white ears.

The best thing about him was his bell, a real honest-to-goodness sheep’s bell tied around his neck with a thick ribbon. For months and months that was Lammie’s voice, a ding-ding-ding every time I sent him into the slightest motion. I carried him around in my arms, comforted by the full, round way he filled my embrace. On bright Saturday afternoons the entire family would retreat to beds and couches and immerse ourselves in books. I leaned on him like a pillow, until his great round flanks flattened from the weight of my head.

At night he kept watch at the foot of my bed, a-ding-ding-ding-ing with my every toss and turn. The sound of Lammie’s bell drove my mother’s boyfriend to distraction, kept him awake far into the night. He asked if there were a way I could muffle it, but the mere thought seemed like sacrilege to me. Lammie’s bell was Lammie’s voice, and hearing his gentle ding-ding-dings as I turned under the covers made me feel safe and protected. One day I came home to find Lammie’s bell missing from his neck. I discovered it under a pillow, reattached it with its length of now-ragged ribbon. Eventually his bell disappeared entirely. But I still have him, 30 years later, still pull him into an embrace beneath the covers, and still hear in my mind the distant ding-ding-ding of his voice lulling me to sleep.